Dogfish Head Scrapple Beer Is the Real Liquid Breakfast

Just when you thought craft beer couldn't get any weirder, Dogfish Head's scrapple-infused breakfast beer hits store shelves and blows your average breakfast stout out of the water. Yes, that's right. Scrapple. The staple of morning breakfast tables across Pennsylvania made from an assemblage of pork bits and cornmeal that has kept the Keystone State full since Benjamin Franklin strolled the streets of Philadelphia. Dogfish Head's Beer for Breakfast, better known by baffled beer imbibers as "scrapple-flavored beer," drops next week at discriminating beverage shops across the nation. Whether or not the United States is ready for scrapple beer, however, remains to be seen.

Dogfish's Beer for Breakfast first debuted last December at the brewery's Delaware-based taprooms, where founder Sam Calagione and his crew of off-centered brewers debut their newest (and sometimes craziest) beers. Want a beer brewed with lobster? You can find it there too. No wonder then that the taproom-exclusive Dogfish scrapple beer was a big enough hit on draft to make it debut this year as the company's marquee winter beer, complimenting its roster of year-round favorites. But although breakfast beers are as common as leaves falling in November, very few of them use meat as one of their main ingredients.

But Dogfish Head's Beer for Breakfast is more than just a scrapple beer. The grain bill (brewing parlance for a recipe) also includes chicory coffee, maple syrup from Calagione's family farm in western Massachusetts, applewood-smoked barley, and cold pressed coffee. Put together, this scrapple beer is not only a tantalizing breakfast stout, it's literally breakfast in a bottle.

But lest we forget the most show-stopping ingredient of all, let's talk a bit about the scrapple. Dogfish's scrapple beer uses meats from Delaware's own Rapa Scrapple, the self-professed leading producer of scrapple and scrapply products. Although Dogfish Beer for Breakfast uses the the tried and true variety for its scrapple beer, Rapa makes a wide array of products, including habanero scrapple, bacon-infused scrapple, beef scrapple, and even turkey scrapple (Thanksgiving goals, anyone?). And with this much variety, Calagione could easily come up with an entire series of scrapple breakfast beers. Knowing the way that Dogfish head comes up with inconceivable brews, I wouldn't rule it out, either.